Upper Middle Class Bias and the "Mad Men Effect"

Two days ago, John Schnatter, the founder and CEO of Papa John's Pizza, made the political news cycle when he told reporters in a conference call that the PPACA (Obamacare) would increase the cost of every pizza about 11-14 cents. Now, I don't want to get into that whole argument, but I do want to talk about an article on CNN that responded to that. More specifically, I want to talk about the article's lead image:

I have never seen Papa John's make a pizza that looked like that. And I like their pizzas. I think they're the best out of the big 3 pizza joints in the US. That pizza looks like a poorly made Neopolitan style pizza margherita, a kind of pizza that's gaining popularity in the US, in part because of its "authentic" Italian origins.

Now, I don't know why the editor chose to lead with that image, but I imagine it went down like this: 

Person 1: Hey, we need a picture of a pizza to go with this political article that's tangentially related to pizza.

Person 2: Okay. I'll go find an image on Getty and get back to you.

I'm not suggesting that the parties involved never ate Papa John's pizza and didn't know how their pizzas looked like, but most likely they thought "oh hey, this image has a pizza that looks like the Neopolitan pizza I ate x number of weeks ago at this charming little Italian pizza parlor in downtown!"

This is an example of subtle upper middle class bias. That's not to say that only people in the upper middle class will go to a restaurant that serves Neopolitan style pizzas. But it's more likely for the upper middle class, and it's more likely that, when faced with a task of "get me an image of pizza" they'll choose a pizza that looks like that.

People working on content for CNN belong exclusively to the upper middle class. And they chose to go with that kind of pizza. It's just another example of the "Mad Men Effect", where upper middle class people like things that only have upper middle class appeal and are keen to show that off to other people. It's why shows like Mad Men, Girls, and The Wire get such disproportionate press coverage and it's why a person would choose a Neopolitan style pizza despite it being vastly less popular than pizza from Domino's, Pizza Hut, or Papa John's.

Now, I've overanalyzed the hell out of a simple image choice that some editor at CNN chose to go with a puff piece about pizza economics and politics, but you have to keep things like this in mind. A person's actions and decisions can reveal a lot about them if you take care to notice. And looking beyond actions and decisions for motive is what separates the chess players from the chess pieces. You have to go beyond the talking point to find out what is really going on.